ex-l wrote: Could references to "The 8" be to eight such archetypes.?
The majority of the semiotics of Gyan can be attributed to more universal symbols. ex-l, I agree with your supposition. The symbols carry power as they come from, and resonate with, archetypal bases, but they are devalued by "fundamentalists" who literalise them as they try to "own" them.
The 8 comes back to the Mandala forms and sacred geometry etc. 1 becomes 2, becomes 4, becomes 8, becomes 16 etc. Of course the swastika, The Tree, et al are all symbols used in many esoteric traditions.
The word "symbol" itself carries with it the idea of bringing two things together. "Sym" - together (think of sympathy, symphony, symmetry) and "bolos" - put, place, so "symbol" is "to put together". The symbol is only a half of a whole - a sign or mark that indicates something else. That something else is obviously the meaning we attribute to the sign. Without the meaning the symbol is incomplete.
A Universal Symbol carries similar meanings to quite different constituencies, or can carry many meaning even to the one constituency e.g. the cross, or the Star of David, even the rosary mala because The symbol resonates with an archetype.
Archetype :
- 1) An original model of which other similar persons, objects, or concepts are merely derivative, copied, patterned, or emulated;
2) According to the Swiss psychologist Carl Jung, a universal pattern of thought, present in an individual's unconscious, inherited from the past collective experience of humanity. (http://www.wiktionary.org).
Archetypes partly derive from congenital primal responses to the world around us. They then grow and multiply and "branch' off into specificities as a need for that arises (e.g. language). But then we'll again need simpler things to "connect" to the big picture easily, so we need symbols, icons, myths. And these, by their 'non-specific" nature, blend into one another and refer to each other. (Readers may have noted the way even language, seen from its roots, take us back to more general, archetypal ways of seeing).
There' s lots of numerological meaning that can be invested into Gyan too. (Which is what I did when I took the 7 day course way back when. In one lesson I was being told of The Ladder and the 84 births, and the number of lives in each age etc. This was after other lessons on The Cycle and the Kalpa tree, and I just had to ask the woman giving me the lesson "why these definite and particular numbers kept coming up?". She could not answer, so I, the student, proceeded to explain them to her in terms of numerology! - I have always had a didactic streak, Moon and Uranus in Sagittarius) You can look up the numerology behind the numbers of 8, 108 etc.
We could look at all the aspects of Gyan (not the BKWSU, the Gyan), one by one, in this way, as one particular expression of a more universal '"religious" impulse.